Adolf Grunbaum

(1923 - 2018)

This paper consists of two related parts: I. A detailed critique of Donald Davidson's thesis—in his “The Paradoxes of Irrationality”—that “…any satisfactory [explanatory] view [of irrationality] must embrace some of Freud's most important theses” (p. 290). I argue that this conclusion is doubly flawed: (i) Davidson's case for it is logically ill‐founded, and (ii) its Freudian plaidoyer is also factually false. II. Relatedly, in the second part, I confute the recent arguments given by Marcia Cavell, Thomas Nagel, et al. to establish that psychoanalytic causal explanations of irrationality are epistemically justified, because they are extensions of the desire‐cumbelief pattern of accounting for intentional actions. As a corollary, it becomes clear that these authors have failed to undermine my epistemological strictures on the foundations of psychoanalysis.

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.

In 1977, David Malament proved the valuable technical result that the simultaneity relation of standard synchrony \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\epsilon=\frac{1}{2}$\end{document} with respect to an inertial observer O is uniquely definable in terms of the relation κ of causal connectibility. And he claimed that this definability undermines my own version of the conventionality of metrical simultaneity within an inertial frame.But Malament’s proof depends on the imposition of several supposedly “innocuous” constraints on any candidate for the simultaneity relation relative to O. Relying on Allen I. Janis’s 1983 challenge to one of these constraints, I argue that Malament’s technical result did not undermine my philosophical construal of the ontological status of relative metrical simultaneity. Furthermore, I show that (a) Michael Friedman’s peremptorily substantivalist critique of my conception, which Malament endorses, is ill-founded, and (b) if Malament had succeeded in discrediting my own conventionalist version of metrical simultaneity, he would likewise have invalidated Einstein’s pioneering version of it.

The three contributions collected in this volume deal with different aspects of a single theme—the logical status of scientific theories in their relation to observation. These lectures, authored by different thinkers, treat this theme in connection with some controversies in the philosophy of science. A nonspecialist who reads these lectures should realize that the theme itself is a perennial one with an ancient lineage. It has concerned philosophers from the earliest era of philosophy on down through the centuries. A central philosophical issue at stake in the lectures is the question of whether scientific theories are testable in terms of our observations such that we can know whether some theories are true and others false. Although differing in their emphases, all three contributors seek a more plausible and nonskeptical philosophical account of the status of scientific theories in relation to observation.

Adolf Grünbaum is one of the giants of 20th century philosophy of science. This volume is the first of three collecting his most essential and highly influential work. The essays collected in this first volume focus on three related areas. They discuss scientific rationality-the problem of what it takes for a theory to be called scientific, and ask whether it is plausible to draw a clear distinction between science and non-science as was famously proposed by Karl Popper. They delve into the debate between determinism and indeterminism, in both science and in the humanities. Grünbaum defends the position of the Humane Determinist, which then leads to a thorough criticism of the current theological approaches to ethics and morality-where Grünbaum defends an explicit Secular Humanism-as well as of prominent theistic interpretations of twentieth century physical cosmologies. The second volume is devoted to Grünbaum's writings on the Philosophy of Physics and Space-Time, and the third to his lectures on the Philosophy of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, including his 1985 Gifford Lectures, which are to be published for the first time.

According to some cosmologists, the big bang cosmogony and even the (now largely defunct) steady-state theory pose a scientifically insoluble problem of matter-energy creation. But I argue that the genuine problem of the origin of matter-energy or of the universe has been fallaciously transmuted into the pseudo-problem of creation by an external cause. A fortiori, it emerges that the initial "true" and "false" vacuum states of quantum cosmology do not vindicate biblical divine creation ex nihilo at all.

Moon and Spencer maintain that there is a divergence between Einstein's analysis of simultaneity, as set forth in his fundamental paper on relativity of 1905, and my treatment of that concept in a recent publication. They write: “Einstein decided that simultaneity is meaningless in all cases of relative motion. … Grünbaum decided that even Einstein's restriction is not sufficiently stringent and that simultaneity is a questionable concept even with stationary observers. … Grünbaum rejects Postulate VI [which states that ‘If A and B are not in relative motion, the time taken for a pulse of radiation to travel in a vacuum from A to B is the same as from B to A’] and is thereby unable to synchronize clocks even when they are stationary.”